A Guide to Rules Engines for IoT

A Guide to Rules Engines for IoT

It is our vision that once the goal of connecting physical products to the internet and collecting their data is achieved, it is through automation that companies will see the true business value of the Internet of Things.

Right now, IoT specific automation is a fragmented space where different technologies, sometimes borrowed from other domains, are used to cover different narrow requirements of IoT use cases. Stream engines may be used for rapid event processing, business logic is automated by either hard coding the business rules or using various frameworks from the traditional BPM domain. However, automation for IoT can not be thought of in separate unconnected layers. IoT business logic for example should reference real-time product data, company processes, different functional teams, IT back-end systems and other input and output sources.

To help make sense of a fragmented space, we have defined seven key requirements to look at when automating for IoT. We have then taken the seven most common rules engines and evaluated each one against this criteria.